Technical information
- Title : Erotic Entanglement
- Date : 1974
- Technique : Oil on paper
- Dimensions : 38 × 46 cm
- Location : Private collection
Biographical / historical context
Dated 1974, this oil on paper belongs to a strand in which Breuillaud approaches the body and desire through organic metaphor. The paper support allows for a more rapid execution, visible pentimenti, and an intimate dialogue between line and stain. In Vence, the artist pursues eroticism not as a narrative subject, but as a transformative energy: the embrace becomes a knot of forms, a passage from one state to another.
The title emphasises the notion of entanglement, essential to the corpus: limbs, torsos, faces, and signs overlap and interlock, and the composition is built through fusion rather than separation. This logic echoes the artist’s “microcosmic” imagination, in which the body is perceived as landscape and the landscape as organism.
Formal / stylistic description
The sheet presents a network of supple, intertwined forms in which anatomy surfaces in fragments: the curve of hips, the twist of legs, profiles, and detached eyes. Paint, laid in thin layers, lets the paper grain show through and preserves a high degree of transparency. Drawing structures the whole: incised lines or retraced contours define edges, but without locking volumes, so that the figures remain in perpetual oscillation.
The palette, clearer and milkier than in the nocturnes, plays on blue-greens and beiges, punctuated by darker accents that serve as anchoring points. Space is not a setting: it is a membrane, an atmosphere, within which the bodies seem to dissolve. Eroticism arises from this extreme proximity—almost indistinct—where identities blur in favour of the movement of the embrace.
Comparative analysis / related works
The work relates to other oils on paper from 1974 through the importance of the visible line and a taste for overlapping silhouettes. It echoes the contemporary large blue scenes, but displaces their intensity: where the canvases multiply apparitions within a mental landscape, this sheet concentrates the drama on a central knot of bodies. The same signs nevertheless recur, notably the isolated eye and hybrid forms that slide from the human toward the vegetal.
Erotic Entanglement can be understood as a study in condensation: on a more intimate format, Breuillaud tightens his motifs and tests formal articulations that he unfolds elsewhere on canvas. This circulation between paper and canvas participates in the creative dynamic of 1974.
Justification of dating and attribution
The 1974 dating is compatible with the manner: transparencies, an emergent drawing, and a vocabulary of anatomical interlace characteristic of the period. The format (38 × 46 cm) and the technique (oil on paper) correspond to studio work in which the artist experiments rapidly with configurations, leaving visible corrections and guiding lines.
The attribution to André Breuillaud rests on the signature and on constants: fragmented figures, metamorphic eroticism, the eye-as-sign, and the fusion of the body with the pictorial atmosphere. The reproduction, dating, and titling in the Catalogue Michelle Philippon (1992) provide an additional documentary support.
Provenance / exhibitions / publications
Vence. Reproduced, titled, and dated in the Catalogue Michelle Philippon (1992).
© Bruno Restout — Catalogue raisonné André Breuillaud